Page 47 of Hell's Kitten

“Sweetheart,” I say breathlessly.

“Daddy,” he mumbles back, pulling me down to hug him despite all the mess we’ve made. I wrap him in my arms and roll us onto our sides to cradle him against me. Cum drips down and makes the sheet even wetter, but I don’t care.

My boy needs me.

“I’m here, kitten,” I assure him as he starts to shake. He’s crying again, but this time, I hope it’s from the relief of letting go of all of those pent-up emotions he’d been carrying around. “Daddy’s here. You’re okay.”

I decide to bring him into a nice hot shower. Not only will it clean us up, but I think he’ll find it soothing. He’s clearly been through a bit of an emotional roller coaster today, and I suspect he’s going to need a little time to process all of it.

I know I’ve fucked up. Words like ‘boyfriend’ don’t resonate with me, so I’ve rarely used them outside of my teen years.‘Daddy’ means so much more. But obviously, Jessie was feeling insecure about our commitment to each other despite it being totally clear to me what was going on.

“My kitten,” I tell him again as I’m drying him off. I hope he’ll understand soon what I mean when I say that. That’s a promise of my devotion. I’m his Daddy, and I want to take care of everything I can for him. I want to be his all, his one and only.

“Daddy,” he says with deep sincerity as he looks into my eyes. I’ll never get tired of hearing that word from his pretty lips.

I’m devastated I let him down. He’s right. I should have been open and talked to him about the war Mayor Durham is waging against me and my friends—my family. I tried to shelter him because I wanted to protect him, but in doing so, I shut him out of really significant events happening in my life right now.

There might be a certain power dynamic at play in our relationship, but he’s got a point. I should treat him like an equal, not like a delicate thing I need to censor hard truths from.

It goes to show how afraid I truly am. Not just of what Durham could do to me, my business, and my friends’ businesses. But of how I feel about Jessie. Contrary to what the fuck-ups I can now see clearly might indicate, I don’t want to blow this. I’ll do everything in my power to be good enough for Jessie and keep him by my side.

So we can have a talk now about all the things I’ve been hiding from him, and he can ask me any questions he needs to. I’ll do my best to answer him fully.

But first, we have to change the bed sheet.

Again.

CHAPTER 18

Jessie

“Thanksso much again for helping me out,” I tell Leah as we make our way into the college cafeteria. “I’m sure these will be a treat!”

Toe Beans might get its baked goods delivered to the café, but Nim’s colleague spent all morning with me making trays of rainbow-frosted cupcakes for the Kittens’ bake sale this afternoon. I might love eating cake, but honestly, I have no idea how to make it, and definitely not well. But Leah jumped at the chance to help me.

“I’m glad to do it,” she insists as we carefully place the boxes down on the table where the other volunteers will arrange them to sell. “I love working at the café, don’t get me wrong. But baking is my happy place. And helping your team out is good karma.”

She tucks a blonde curl behind her ear and looks around the cafeteria. Lakelyn and the committee have done a great job setting up signs and balloons to decorate the usually pretty gray room. We’re doing our best to raise some cash to help with our transportation to the Snowdown in a few weeks. Our usual bus company accidentally double-booked us, apparently,so we’re having to fork out extra in order to get a last-minute replacement.

I think about Leah this morning, covered in flour in her kitchen, squealing in delight when the rainbow frosting came out of the piping bag just right. She definitely was in her happy place.

It makes me reflect on my own new happy place. In my former life, I would have said it was on the competition mat with my old school team, especially that moment when you finish a routine and know you’ve hit it perfectly, only to turn around and see everyone celebrating and realize they did, too.

In recent years, it been a bit different. A bit quieter. My happy place was sitting out on the back porch with Mom, watching the sunset as we sipped on iced tea. But her illness always loomed, and it wasn’t until this past summer that we could do that and truly be content, knowing that she’d beaten that son of a bitch.

Now? God. That’s an easy one. My happy place is when I’m in full kitten mode with my Daddy doting on me. It’s the purest bliss I could ever imagine.

I’m so glad we talked after my mani-pedi last week. He really seemed to understand why I was so upset with him. I almost felt bad, though, when I realized he definitely didn’t know thatIdidn’t know how much of a thing we were. Apparently, asking to be my Daddy was a Big Deal, and from that point in his mind we were ‘going steady,’ as my mom would say.

But now I know. I’ve been practicing calling him my boyfriend by dropping it into conversation with people over the past few days. The first time I tried it with Alannah, she squealed and practically knocked me over with her hug, so I’d say that was a success. I even mentioned to my mom that I might be seeing someone. I’m still too apprehensive to give her the full details, but it’s a start at least.

I regret calling him a liar. He’s nothing like Parker. And it wasn’t like he was telling me things that weren’t true. He was just avoiding mentioning events that were upsetting him and out of his control. Now I think he gets why that was bad. If we’re a real couple, then I want to help shoulder his burdens, not be an additional one for him.

The trouble is he was partly right. There isn’t anything I can do to help the situation either, and now I’m just worrying about it as well. It’s so incredibly unfair that the mayor has decided to use the Cardinals as a scapegoat to try and get himself reelected when he could be focusing on a real problem like all the dilapidated services and buildings in the town.

It makes sense, though, if that McKenna guy is trying to bully enough places out of business so he can buy them up. It sounds like he’s playing a long game to make serious money. In a way, it reminds me of that Richard Gere film where he buys up the companies to break them apart.

Maybe McKenna needs to meet a Julia Roberts to make him see the error of his ways and find a little humanity.

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